I am starting to have a few events start to shape up around my book launch! I have an interview for a podcast coming up–I’m so far supposed to do the interview this weekend, then it will be edited and released whenever the host has a spot to insert it. Hopefully I can post the audio link to the Tombigbee Tales podcast here on my site.
Right around launch I have a signing at my local independent bookstore, Lemuria Books in Jackson. I had filled out a form and left a review copy at the store a few weeks ago, and they contacted me back for Saturday, August 24, at noon. It’s only a few days after launch but before football season really gets in gear. So that was a wonderful feeling to have getting this one set up.
The next week I am going to try to give back to my community back home in Ackerman with a reading and signing event at Ackerman Library, a place that was a home-away-from home for me. If mom needed to run errands or grocery shop or go to the bank, she’d drop me off there–and I was in heaven. No one ever bothered me, and I never bothered anyone else with so many books around me to read! I feel like that will be a real full-circle event for me. It is currently set for September 5 at 6 p.m. (again working round the football games!)
The final event that’s fallen into place recently is being part of a forum on Hurricane Katrina literature in observance of the twentieth anniversary of the storm. So that will be all the way off into next year with an event in conjunction with Prince George County’s Office of Human Rights in Virginia.
Of course, I am aiming to schedule more–the goal is to have at least one event/speaking opportunity a month for the first year the book is out. So this feels like a really good start! Three-and-a-half months before it’s out in stores. I wonder when the reality kicks in. I still feel like this is all some kind of dream. But it’s a good one. If it’s a dream, it’s one of the best.
Julie Liddell Whitehead 